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AlexErranton Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap

It _is_ sus, but you should be willing to forgive. It's not like it was done out of animus, and I assume that an academic/foreigner is unaccustomed to how production software conventions work. Their baseline is less important, more important is how quickly they learn/adopt "best practices". Y-intercept, slope, etc.

I say this as literally the first HN comment to call them out on this.

AlexErranton Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU

I mean... If you wanna build your project on a language that has no auditable history, reproducible builds, artifacts/releases, force pushes and breaks literally EVERY fork/PR, has no way to build or even see v2.0.3, and doesn't have changelogs... then I guess that's cool. You must be a trusting person; I unfortunately am not like that.

AlexErranton Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU

Props. G'luck with your project, I know what it's like to work nights & weekends. Unfortunately, first impressions matter.

AlexErranton Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU

Erm, because it looks weird? Do you know any other language projects that squash their repos down to 1 commit? That's a destruction of trust, which is kinda important if you want people to build on your language.

Virtually everyone has AI slop in the commit history. No one's judging you for the commit history. Everyone's code smells, but the fact that you're ashamed/hiding it is... odd.

> there's a lot of personal info

You should know that force pushing doesn't hide actual commits; it's trivially viewable if someone just iterates https://github.com/bendlang/bend/activity?ref=main e.g. https://github.com/bendlang/bend/commit/d184863 so like... why bother.

AlexErranton Bend – a language that blocks AI mistakes via proof and runs on GPUs

https://github.com/bendlang/bend

...did they just squash the repo to 1 commit for v2.0.4? Why? Yall should know that in this age of AI trust is the real currency... and nuking your history is one hell of a way to raise eyebrows.

> Enjoy bug-free, fast vibe-coded apps! Hints: ask it to write laws for whatever should never break, and to parallelize everything you want running fast. Bend is young: if anything goes wrong, ask it to open an issue.

Emphasis mine. I don't want to be snarky but like... come on.

AlexErranton Performance Improvements in .NET 11

Dumb Q: should a non-systems-language dev know/read assembly?

    ; Arm64
    --- .NET 10
    +++ .NET 11
    @@ -13,8 +13,6 @@
                ble     G_M000_IG04

    G_M000_IG03:
    -            cmp     w1, w2
    -            bhs     G_M000_IG05
                str     wzr, [x0, w1, UXTW #2]

    G_M000_IG04:
    @@ -25,4 +23,4 @@
                bl      CORINFO_HELP_RNGCHKFAIL
                brk     #0

    -; Total bytes of code 68
    +; Total bytes of code 60

I know C#/F# decently well, but is there any reason to actually pull out the ol textbooks and learn wtf the above is saying?

AlexErranton Performance Improvements in .NET 11

FWIW the .NET 10 release also had 2 occurrences of "real" in literally the first paragraph.

I, too, tire of the constant YOU WROTE THIS WITH LLMs outrage. An incredible engineer dumped an ENORMOUS amount of technical knowledge at your feet, and you're commenting on the smell? Is that all you have to contribute?

I saw this too on the Ryan Carniato/SolidJS 2.0 announcement post. A world-class engineer makes a great blog post, and all the comments can focus on are the LLM-smells. Oh well. Any reason not to learn, I guess.

AlexErranton AI 2027 (2025)

This doesn't solve grinding? If it did, we'd see results by now (Published: 27 January 2026), and there's months of delay between submission and publication.

I'm willing to be wrong, but I'm just not seeing anything worth doomering over. There are multiple companies throwing AI at materials discovery; a research paper about a "data-driven framework" is about as unthreatening to my thesis as it gets. I'm willing to cede the point if say, Radical releases ~3 new materials that have commercial applicability and ~3x some useful metric e.g. tensile strength, but until then, to my amateur eye, it looks like AI+Real World is missing its ChatGPT moment.

AlexErranton AI 2027 (2025)

Agree.

Gonna note that biology is even less grindable than ordinary chemistry/physics/engineering. We'll have advancements in other real-world fields before AI-powered bioengineering becomes A Thing.

AlexErranton AI 2027 (2025)

Sup fellow Alex.

> AI with real-world competence is coming very soon

Disagree, Moravec's Paradox remains undefeated. How long has Elon promised self-driving cars? Or how long have we been seeing humanoid-robot-walking demos? Laundry folding demos?

Let's assume that a magical AI powered robot hand lands tomorrow. How long do you think it'll take to ramp up assembly/production/distribution/sourcing/materials/QA for, say, a million of them? Never mind the legal/integration/maintenance time.

And even once those have landed, and assuming they are ALL put to work on iterating on research testing to build out super-high-capacity-drone-batteries, how long do you think it would take for that to evolve into killer-insect-drones? BTW you should know that even though high capacity silicon carbon batteries exist, they haven't supplanted other Li-ion batteries for a host of reasons. A million things stand between a technology working in a lab and surviving the real world.

And during this entire process, the (geo)political/social/legal process will be churning away, changing the societal landscape in which the killer-robots land. Not to mention that mechanistic interpretability is (likely) somewhat grindable. A lab just needs to dump a billion dollars of compute into it after it declares AGI.

I'm unconvinced we get killer insect drones before we crack mech-interp.

And even once we get killer insect drones, they need to somehow have no kill-switch and then literally exterminate everyone on the globe? Can you see why I have a problem with doomers predicting human extinction within the decade?

I'm putting words in your mouth and not replying to precisely what you said, just the general vibe. LMK if I overstepped.

P.S. we do have mass production of AI designed systems today e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna There's nuance to this whole thing.

AlexErranton AI 2027 (2025)

Literally 2 days ago, from a former Anthropic researcher:

> The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.

https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476203863224394

> The dynamics are plausible

Please elaborate: what dynamics? This is rather vague. My point is that AI can't grind real world physics/chemistry/engineering. What dynamics are in play here?

AlexErranton AI 2027 (2025)

My main issue with this timeline is that AI still has trouble transitioning to the real world. It predicts for 2029:

> There are swarms of insect-sized drones that can poison human infantry before they are even noticed; flocks of bird-sized drones to hunt the insects; new ICBM interceptors, and new, harder-to-intercept ICBMs. The rest of the world watches the buildup in horror, but it seems to have a momentum of its own.

Does anyone really predict insect drones _in production_ 3 years from now, to the degree that we need bird drones to hunt the insect drones? How the hell are these things powered?

Lean/math/millenienium prizes are "grindable" [0]. Wake me up when AI is making order-of-magnitude improvements in ungrindable real world tasks like batteries, hypersonic engine manufacturing, and stealth/silent motors that you can't hear.

[0]: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm

AlexErranton On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

Ah derp; that's what I get for moving too fast. Genuine thanks for calling me out on my bullshit. (and this is also why I prefer auditable citations instead of casual "my reading of twitter is...")

I retract the projectnash citation; I grabbed it from the Cool World's youtube description, thinking it was a blog version of the video. It was not. I suggest watching the video instead.

AlexErranton On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

2. Fair, and further I would agree that OpenAI not knowing if prior user prompts were part of training data is concerning and will only lead to more secrecy.

3. ctrl-f "x.com" in this thread only yields https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2097375276384567642

and frankly, I'm unwilling to give Elon any more traffic to dig up drama that ultimately doesn't matter. I'm not seeing anything especially childish, but y'know... I'm not sure I care.

AlexErranton On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

This clarification substantially changes the flavor/nuance of your OP; may I suggest an edit (assuming the locktime hasn't passed)?

Separately, I disagree that intellectual work has ever been free of "dark forest"-style secrecy. Scientists everywhere have worried about being scooped; AI just magnifies that (as all tools have; e.g. Leeuwenhoek lenses).

And thirdly, if you want to make a stronger case for "I feel even less confident in them as a team to be shepherding this much capital and compute", you should give citations and arguments. From what I've seen, there's drama, it's much OpenAI trying to avoid scooping, and Tristan being stuck in a game of telephone, and Levent being incommunicado.

If you have a better analysis, you should say so instead of being vague.

AlexErranton On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

1. What does the dark forest have to do with this? Because "the most senior OpenAI researchers" are shitposting on social media, we've an answer to the Fermi paradox???

2. The dark forest is fun for scifi stories, but is mathematically bunk anyway https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-dark-forest-hypothesis-is-... https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/1l06cnk/cool_w... https://www.projectnash.com/aliens-the-fermi-paradox-and-the...

When doomposting please actually say something substantive. Negative news always gets clicks/updoots; fight that human tendency.

AlexErranton Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

Cookie nonsense aside, the EU is mandating that AI companies watermark their output.

I'm curious if that (noticably) diminishes the quality of the output.

AlexErranton OpenAI's new reasoning technique alarms AI safety experts

Sebastian Raschka, author of Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch), commented on this:

> Reusing layers does not by itself suppress visible chain of thought. It adds computation in hidden states before the next token is emitted, just as ordinary transformer layers do. But based on the information we have, the only plausible interpretation here is that if a model uses more of these recurrent passes, it may need to generate fewer intermediate reasoning tokens.

https://sebastianraschka.com/blog/2026/openai-astra-looped-t...

AlexErranton Google Antigravity introduces Boost deep reasoning (/boost)

So... is it? You seem to be implying the opposite.

AlexErranton Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

You're missing the pattern of behavior from Anthropic. They constantly market like this: the session link, the Co-Authored by Claude, the unwillingness to adopt AGENTS.md. Hell, on workflows on 2.1.246 Claude's been ignoring the "attribution" block in settings.json and gone right back to coauthoring every commit.

What's the odds on them fixing that bug anytime soon.

AlexErranton Google Antigravity introduces Boost deep reasoning (/boost)

> even though I'm using a free tier

Erm, that's to be expected. GPUs ain't free. Anyone can make a free account and cost them potentially infinite compute, so a phone number is a way to lock that down. Might not be the "best" way, but hey: it's free.

AlexErranton Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

If _you_ choose to do it, no.

If the tool auto-does it, yes.

AlexErranton Framework Refreshes 12" Laptop

> we’ve also switched to a reprogrammable keyboard controller using open source ZMK firmware

o.m.g.

Is this the first laptop to do this?

AlexErranton Degraded performance for multiple models

Opus5 decided it would be a good idea to include my email as part an HTTP request header's User Agent because Anthropic includes your email as part of the system prompt.

Fucking morons over there.

AlexErranton Claude: Degraded Performance for Multiple Models

Another week, another outage, another cache expiration of my prompts through no fault of my own.

At least OpenAI has the decency to reset after a serious outage.

AlexErranton Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk

Agree 100%. To quote myself:

---

Which do you think is worse: smoking, or not exercising?

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Look at Figure 2C in particular. The hazard ratio of smoking is 1.41. The hazard ratio between "Low" (<25th percentile) and "Below Average" (25th-49th percentile) cardiovascular health is 1.95.

In other words, it is better to be a smoker than in the lower 25% of non-exercisers. By far. It's not even close.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40080849

Let me emphasize: that exercise hazard ratio is between LOW and BELOW-AVERAGE.

AlexErranton Semaglutide linked to 26% lower 5-year predicted dementia risk

People kick around the idea of the "personal fat threshold". E.g. caucasians seem to be better at carrying fat than, say, Southeast Asians. White people seem to be able to better store fat without metabolic side effects; SEA seems to get T2D at a much lower bodyfat percentage.

AlexErranton Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk

To "actshully" you (because there are no absolutes in biology) pro-triathlete Lionel Sanders got his hba1c up to prediabetic range (5.9)

https://www.tri247.com/triathlon-news/elite/lionel-sanders-t...

Also age plays a pretty significant role. I know older asians who regularly walk who still got T2D. You could argue that walking isn't physically active enough... but they'd argue otherwise. It's all relative.

AlexErranton Introducing Toast 1

Is this performative posting? We're supposed to care that you don't care?

Could you imagine this forum if everyone acted like you?

AlexErranton Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

To not answer your question, I have a claude stop hook that my status line uses to tell me how close my cache is to expiring https://pastebin.com/JLXUG16Q

_entirely_ vibecoded don't @ me.